Artist Statement - The Cascade Project (2013-2014)

Artist Statement - The Cascade Project (2014)

Landscape is relative, performative. Tied to our sense of geography, time and shifting notions of history, it serves as a physical anchor, a philosophical boundary—the innate expression of linear time tied to the measurable boundary of social space. The Cascade engages landscape as a permeating condition—a collage of interpretive macro and micro understandings, always in a physical and socio-political state of flux.

Rooted in a personal connection to the Southern California landscape which permeates American television from the 1960s-80s, I excavate instances of the conceptual space-place of the Mojave Desert and its entanglement with the very real, the vividly scripted and the culturally iconic. The LA County of my youth carries personal, regional, cultural, and international levels of understanding and history, intensified by its presence in television narrative. This transitory, filmic landscape punctuates a shared, macro-level understanding of time and location. The Cascade freezes a trace of this literal and ephemeral physicality—folding the moment back in on itself as distorted screen captures that undergo digital transformation.

The Cascade suspends geographic (and linear) traces as photographs once removed from their physical location by the original television filming and again removed by the act of capturing a temporal instant. The environments thus inhabit the actual, the imagined and the transient place of recollection, emblematic of a collapsed space conflating personal history, geologic reality and cultural production. Both an experienced and imagined sense of place adopt non-linear roles in this digital elastic-space. Serialization, multiplicity and accumulation allow counter-memory to emerge as stills excavated from the “porous container” of film.